“It’s an unwillingness to think that manifests itself across a whole society,” said Jonathan Gatehouse, senior writer at Maclean’s during the interview with Newsradio 1130.

“If you look at how many Americans said last year that they have not read a single book, it’s almost a quarter of the people in the United States. Not too many years ago, it was only eight per cent. You have standardized tests in schools where Americans lag behind nations… [including] Canada and most European nations.”

The full Maclean’s story, which is available on newsstands and for digital subscribers, claims anti-intellectualism and anti-science is truly running rampant in the U.S.

“One of the big problems identified is that many Americans fundamentally distrust science, and it’s a trend that’s accelerating,” said Gatehouse during his News1130 interview. “It started off as worries about things like climate science but it has become a whole host of things: whether vaccines are effective, whether evolution ever happened, whether the Big Bang is a theory or a reality. It’s amazing.”

The article also focuses on whether these trends should be a warning to Canadians and whether that nation could face a similar fate.

Ultimately Gatehouse told News1130 that he believes ignorance is contagious and perhaps it is time to put the U.S. in quarantine.